“Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?”

1. "A blogs are still a state of mind. To their most ardent advocates, blogs are standard-bearers of a core set of democratic values: participation, egalitarianism and transparency."(Renior) Democratic leaders like blogs because they can see what people have to say about the voting instead of just seeing the numbers of whose winning in the race. They also can say what they want to say to voters and get it out there fast, easy and accessible. 

2. Blogging is going to expand digital media convergence because it is allowing voters and the politicians to write whatever they want online and have everyone see it. The participatory culture is using the Internet to express how they feel about the polls and the voting. Blogging is becoming the next big thing because of how accessible and fast it is. 

3. “If television made politics more elitist and less substantive, blogs- and more broadly, netroots tools- have the potential to become engines of truly democratic, bottom-up, issue-rich political participation” (Chaudhry).

4. Blogs let people interact with one another and talk about each others views on politics and allows them to write whatever they want. Anyone can use a blog and it is used in many different ways. It is helpful to everyone and has may opportunities linked with it like the freedom to write whatever you want. 

Virtual Revolution

1. The web favors the English language because that is what most people speak and is the easiest. But not everyone as a whole speaks English, so the web limits people from using it.

2. Wikipedia is known to be a very fast and very available source for web users. But a lot of people do not like it because so many people from all over can edit and write anything they want on any topic on Wikipedia. People see the information from inaccurate and not reliable. On the other hand people who write on it could be putting some very accurate and useful information. This site is a great example of how peoples ideas come together as one. Wikipedia explains some of the digital convergence because it shows how much the web has grown from where it started.

3. The Web makes it possible for different kinds of digital convergence because of TCP/IP protocol. Technology has had the chance to advance and grow and become quicker and more accessible for people.

4. The Internet can become a huge challenge for the traditonal authority because anyone can write whatever they want on the web and no one knows for sure what is true or not.

5. I think getting information free helps everyone in a lot of ways and can help us get free. You can learn so much from the web and it brings all kinds of opportuinites. The only concerns I would have about having complete freedom with the web is downloading illegally and getting scams and virus through all the downloading.

6. The internet has had so many changes from when it first started, theres things people couldn't even have dreamed of that we have now. You have the freedom to do whatever you want on the web. This creates possibility for digital convergence because people from all over come together to make the web how it is today.

7. The Web is such a essential part of everyones daily lives that it has to be free. Some people would not be using the web today because they might not be able to afford it if it cost money. If the web was not free it would be very limited to people and it wouldn't be able to help people who really need it.

Questions for "Historical Development of the Internet and World Wide Web

1. Broadband service is the key to success for online communication because it is high speed and makes it easier for people to watch videos and it makes it possible to get a lot of information from multiple variety of sources. Socially people are "more likely to create and distribute media content than dial-up users, even though upload speeds are still slower than download speeds." The cost of broadband connection can be quite high for people who are lower on the socioeconomic scale, leaving them at a disadvantage.

2. The World Wide Web opens the door to much wider audience because it is available to people all over the world to see the same thing. Once the internet was created it became the dominant web browser because it was free and you could post whatever and whenever you wanted to. The acoustic world is very broad and not limited and the internet can share info with a huge amount of people at the same time.

3. If the government supported the development of broadband Internet for everyone no one would have free range of whatever they wanted to put on the internet. 

4. Another industry that would benefit from this would be marketing. The marking industries make new advertisements due to whats going on rapidly at that time. They will be on top of anything new at that moment and will send out advertisements as soon as something happens. 

5. A common method of online communication that could be improved is Skype. Skype is a great application for video calling face to face with people all over the world. When I use Skype though it usually does lag a lot and the connection is not good. If it would improve and not have problems with me not being able to hear the person I'm talking to or see them, I think people would use it more and be happier with the quality of the video chat. 

Questions for "Digital McLuhan"

1. The acoustic world is how we see the world using our senses and it has no boundaries. The alphabetical visual world had more to it then just print it meant something to the people. The media of television became part of the acoustic world because you see the same screen and images as people do all over the country at any given time.  

2. The alphabet has segregating tendencies because when it first started it could only be seen by one set of eyes at a time and it was difficult to make copies for other people. The printing press reversed this because it was able to make to make copies of texts to more then just one person and so there was more available.

3. The alphabet communicates by finding acoustic space it creates online. The online acoustic world is different from the television, radio or print acoustic world because it’s interactive. You can have online conversations with people online, over the radio and through television they have games that people watch and involve themselves in to interactive with the TV.

4.The two selection criteria are we want media to extend our abilities of communication beyond certain points of just the seeing of the eye of a screen of hearing of media from a tv or radio. We also want media to gather information that may have been lost. In the next 20 years our online communication will continue to replace each other with new and better technologies.